Martin Scorsese to Direct Leonardo DiCaprio in THE WOLF OF WALL STREET; Filming Could Start in June [UPDATED]

It looks like director Martin Scorsese and Leonardo DiCaprio will be re-teaming once more, this time on an indie film. The duo will tackle the adaptation of Jordan Belfort’s 2008 memoir The Wolf of Wall Street. Ridley Scott was previously set up to direct the film with DiCaprio for Warner Bros., but apparently DiCaprio’s manager was able to secure independent financing for the project and will now shoot the flick sans-studio.

Scorsese is currently busy finishing up his 3D family film Hugo Cabret, but Vulture reports that with financing secured, filming could commence on the 1990’s stockbroker success story as early as June. Terrence Winter, creator/executive producer of HBO’s Boardwalk Empire (for which Scorsese directed the pilot, and is also a producer), wrote the screenplay for Wall Street, so it looks to be a cracker-jack team lined up for the flick. Is it too early to buy tickets? Hit the jump for a synopsis of Belfort’s memoir. [Update: It appears the presumption that this would be Scorsese’s next project was a bit premature, as he’s actually planning on directing Silence as his next film. He’s still attached to The Wolf of Wall Street, it just looks like it won’t be his next project after Hugo Cabret. Read our story on Silence here.]

By day he made thousands of dollars a minute. By night he spent it as fast as he could, on drugs, sex, and international globe-trotting. From the binge that sank a 170-foot motor yacht, crashed a Gulfstream jet, and ran up a $700,000 hotel tab, to the wife and kids who waited for him at home, and the fast-talking, hard-partying young stockbrokers who called him king and did his bidding, here, in his own inimitable words, is the story of the ill-fated genius they called…

In the 1990s Jordan Belfort, former kingpin of the notorious investment firm Stratton Oakmont, became one of the most infamous names in American finance: a brilliant, conniving stock-chopper who led his merry mob on a wild ride out of the canyons of Wall Street and into a massive office on Long Island. Now, in this astounding and hilarious tell-all autobiography, Belfort narrates a story of greed, power, and excess no one could invent.
Reputedly the prototype for the film Boiler Room, Stratton Oakmont turned microcap investing into a wickedly lucrative game as Belfort’s hyped-up, coked-out brokers browbeat clients into stock buys that were guaranteed to earn obscene profits–for the house. But an insatiable appetite for debauchery, questionable tactics, and a fateful partnership with a breakout shoe designer named Steve Madden would land Belfort on both sides of the law and into a harrowing darkness all his own.

From the stormy relationship Belfort shared with his model-wife as they ran a madcap household that included two young children, a full-time staff of twenty-two, a pair of bodyguards, and hidden cameras everywhere—even as the SEC and FBI zeroed in on them—to the unbridled hedonism of his office life, here is the extraordinary story of an ordinary guy who went from hustling Italian ices at sixteen to making hundreds of millions. Until it all came crashing down…